How medical students in the United Kingdom think: About anthropology, for example

This chapter is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two UK (United Kingdom) medical schools exploring perceptions and understandings around social sciences, in particular anthropology, as applied to medical education. My main contention is that it is paramount that all stakeholders (students, educators, professional regulators) accept that medical education itself is a social construct and does not exist independently of social conventions. What is selected from a possible range of things to be studied during medical education, reflects a hierarchy of disciplinary knowledge and an understanding of what is worthy of focussed attention. Far from being objective, what medical students consider ‘facts’ to be studied, is a selection educators made. What social science has to offer is often perceived as ‘common sense’, but ‘common sense’ is not enough to understand society and to see the relationship between individual lives and the effects of larger social forces. Our medical graduates should be able to conceptualize the personal problems they encounter in clinical practice as part of wider societal processes. They should be able to understand that the personal is social. It is therefore time that medical education takes the hidden curriculum with regards to social science, and in particular anthropology, seriously.